Chapter VII. Bright Young Things. #2
Didier’s commentary barely registered with Cecilia. She had grown used to his penchant for weaving sex into the narrative. It was simply how he worked. How many photographers worked. He was merely setting the tone of the shoot.
She had overheard the multiple conversations between him, Beatriz, the head stylist, and Jean-Luc and Rafaella, the creative and art directors.
They were going for aspirational, international, aristocratic but diverse.
Best friends from a Swiss boarding school during les grandes vacances at one of their families’ homes, a few years postgrad.
They were very specific in their execution, in their targeted demographic, and in their desire to stand apart from the competition.
Calvin was too titillating. Tommy too hip-hop.
Ralph too faux Waspy. J.Crew too collegiate.
Benetton too on the nose. But di Varenna’s new campaign, “The Sweet Life”—a nod to Fellini—was elegant, effortless, elite.
Didier, however, could not help but inject a strong element of sexuality into all of his photos, and that evidently was a huge part of his appeal.
He repeated himself then, in French, and Cecilia watched as Anouk parted her lips, kicked off both sandals, and extended her long legs into Elliot’s lap. No further prompting necessary.
Maybe she wasn’t a teenager after all.
Bas—who was the most established at the table, with two GQ covers and a fragrance campaign under his belt—reclined in his chair, spread his arms, one dangling over Anouk’s shoulder, and nodded across to Elliot. “Who knew you had such good taste in men, Thorpe?”
Elliot laughed, gray eyes twinkling. Bas had an enviable ease and a disarming smile. They’d been well cast, Cecilia thought. They were, indeed, the Beautiful People.
The photos Didier took that afternoon were stunning, iconic, even.
Cecilia thought of it as sex and candy. The carnival-color palette of the restaurant, the laid-back vibe of the beachfront, Anouk’s lissome limbs extending from a flouncy miniskirt and a navy bikini top, the boys in blue-and-white linen, tearing into the lobster with wet fingers, smiling, laughing …
Skin and hair and youth and perfect teeth.
This pretend life they’d created, this fiction—whatever it was—Cecilia wanted to inhale it.
To breathe it in and make it hers. To exist within this bubble.
Later, when the talent and most of the team had trekked back to base camp and their respective hotels, Cecilia and Marc were left behind to break down the equipment and straighten their corner of the restaurant.
“What did that model say to you?” Marc asked. He’d removed his safari hat and was resting at the edge of the table, swilling from a bottle of Pacífico, and staring out at the Gulf. The salmon-colored sky.
“Which model?”
“The girl. Anouk?”
Cecilia nodded, nonchalant. She was once again on the floor logging the film, transcribing the processing notes for each roll. Didier had shot a total of eighteen.
“Nothing. She just wanted to know if I was from the Caribbean.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Hmm,” he said, before swilling another mouthful. And then, “That’s not what it looked like from my end.”
“What did it look like from your end?”
Marc turned to look at her then, dead serious. “She was definitely flirting with you.”
Cecilia attempted to laugh. “Don’t be silly. She’s a model, and like fifteen.”
“She’s nineteen.”
“How do you know that?”
“I asked Maren.”
Maren was the producer. The person responsible for putting all the myriad pieces together.
Including the call sheet. They’d worked with her on several assignments.
She was, like many in the fashion world, independently wealthy, and from Bedford, a much tonier hamlet in Westchester than Cecilia’s Hartsdale.
Maren wore tailored navy blazers and white jeans, and Hermès scarves wrapped around her long blond ponytail.
She was only in her thirties but outwardly far more self-possessed, and Cecilia envied her polish and composure.
“Why would you ask Maren?”
Marc shrugged and turned his attention back to the horizon to finish his beer.
“Wanted to know if she understood English. She does. Some. Also, pretty sure I’ve had more women flirt with me than you have.
I think I know what it looks like,” he said eventually, pushing up off the edge of the table. “I’m going to start loading the van.”
Cecilia skipped dinner.
A handful of the crew were driving into town to check out the nightlife and a restaurant, but Cecilia was reluctant to spend money on an outing their bookkeeper might not reimburse.
(Meals? Yes. Leisure activities, excessive drinking, and nightclubs?
No.) Also, she was counting her calories.
So she did what she often did on location, and downed a SlimFast bar and an Earl Grey tea alone in her room before settling in to make the dreaded call back east to Lorry.
Although she would not admit it to herself, in her gut, she feared this was the beginning of the end.
They’d met in the summer of 1994. Randomly, she’d thought, on the 3:49 train heading to Brewster North.
He’d sat down across from her and asked if he could borrow a pen, and before she disembarked at White Plains to spend the weekend with her parents, he’d managed to get her business card.
It wasn’t until their first phone call forty-eight hours later that he confided he’d seen her buying her ticket at Grand Central and followed her onto her train.
But by that point she was already smitten.
He’d had her pen (a Pilot Precise V5 Rolling Ball, $5.99 for a set of five) messengered to the studio that morning, accompanied by a brief note on personalized letterpress stationery, and an original poem:
Overwhelming diffidence
Overcome
Beyond comprehension,
Desire
Serene, as light, and beyond compare
The will
Persists
And a dialectic is born
Blossoms, exquisite and luminous
The unfolding,
Unfurling
Slow, sound, sweeping
And Time is stolen
In shadows
Rushing with promise
Time,
Time.
Time,
Oh, would that we had but one more stop.
—Lorry
Cecilia was not entirely certain what to make of it, but Lorry had included his phone number in the note, and so that evening, back at her Upper West Side apartment, she pushed aside her doubts—the fact that he was five years her junior and on a self-imposed hiatus from college while he tried to figure out his next step (he’d managed to divulge the above between 125th Street and Hartsdale)—and called him.
“So you’re really twenty,” she’d said.
“I’m really twenty.” His voice was deep, warm. She had been trying all day to remember it, to recall the details of his face. Golden skin, a kind smile, beautiful brows, lashes. “And you are…?”
“I’ll be twenty-five next month.”
“Wow. You look—”
“Younger. I know.”
For some reason she’d expected him to lose interest then.
He did not. Instead, he had laughed, and said in his New England boarding-school accent, with its telltale prolonged vowels and broad As, “Pretty sure if I’d known that when I saw you on Sahhturday ahhfternoon, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to stalk you in the way I did. ”
“Stalk me?”
“Um, sort of. Yaahh. That wasn’t my train. I’m on the New Haven Line. I live in Greenwich.”
For a moment Cecilia had been speechless.
The familiar melody of the Mister Softee ice-cream truck wafting up through her window.
A random car alarm. Her bedroom, stifling and humid.
June in the city. A world away from the bucolic splendor of Fairfield County and what she imagined was Laurence Charles Kenter’s charmed life.
She’d wondered then if she should have been concerned for her well-being or impressed with his audacity. She’d decided on the latter. “Greenwich? So, then, how did you get home?”
He’d smiled. She could hear him smiling. “I got off at North White Plains and took a cab.”
“Wow.”
“That sounds completely crazy, right? I swear I’ve never done anything like that. But I saw you at the ticket booth and you were just … beautiful … and I thought, well, carpe diem. You only live once, right?”
The memory of that phone call, and the numerous heady moments that followed in those first few months, were still so clear. He’d pursued her unabashedly. Fearlessly. He’d opened up his heart and his world and his bed. And everything about it was new to her, and extraordinary.
He was everything that she was not: wealthy, Jewish, preppy, white.
He was sensitive, and thoughtful, and aloof.
And while others his age were consumed with random hookups, partying, and generally having a good time, Laurence Charles Kenter was fixated on saving the planet and humanity.
Additionally, he was surprisingly adept at navigating female genitalia for one so young.
And he had a penchant for the R&B group Jodeci.
For all these reasons, Cecilia found herself enamored. And, it appeared, Lorry felt likewise.
But that was eighteen months ago.
“Hey,” he said now. He’d answered on the third ring. Nonchalant. As if a few days prior he hadn’t placed a missive in her hands that might ultimately destroy her.
“How’s Cabo?”
“Fine. Good. Fine.”
“And the weather?”
“Sunny. Eighty degrees. No humidity. Perfect.”
“You guys shot today?”
“Half day. Just one setup. Tomorrow is our first full day. We’ve got a four AM call time.”
The small talk was excruciating, but Cecilia hesitated to initiate more, knowing once they got to the crux of the matter, there’d be no turning back.
“Soooooo,” he said finally. “I’m guessing you read my letter.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And I imagine you have questions.”
“A few.” She could hear her voice trembling, and she struggled to steady it.